


We'll Give It A Shot

by Curator_of_Curiosity



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bittersweet, F/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2020-09-30 10:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20445902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curator_of_Curiosity/pseuds/Curator_of_Curiosity
Summary: Somehow, Jyn and Cassian escape Scarif's destruction—battered and bruised, but alive. The two are now left to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.





	1. Breathing

They didn’t die on the beach. Somehow, they managed to get to a shuttle before the wave hit them. They barely outran the shockwave when the crust of Scarif finally gave way to the Death Star.  
When it was over, they hid on a chunk of rock space rock, cut power to everything except life support, and waited in the dark, though what exactly they were waiting for—Sleep? Rescue? Death?— neither of them knew.  
Cassian adjusted himself in his seat. Jyn could see his breath in the air as he inhaled sharply. His breathing had been shallow.  
“What do we do now?” asked Jyn.  
“What can we do now?” said Cassian.  
He didn’t move much, Jyn noticed. When he did, he groaned and winced and hissed in pain. He had more bruises and broken bones than he cared to admit. Even shivering seemed to hurt him.  
They couldn’t stay here, Jyn knew. She started flicking switches.  
“What are you doing?” Cassian asked.  
She didn’t look up from the controls. “I’m getting us back to Yavin.”  
Cassian didn’t say anything.  
Jyn turned around and looked at him. He was still crusted with sand. Jyn knew she must be too. “Cassian?”  
Cassian looked up as if only just remembering Jyn was there. “Hmm?”  
“You should—” Jyn stammered. “You ought to get some rest.”  
“No.” Cassian spoke gently, but firmly. “I need to stay awake. You’re the one who needs to rest.”  
“But someone has got to pilot this ship!” she said.  
Cassian didn’t change his tone. “I can handle it, Jyn.”  
Jyn leaned back against her chair, folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes. The last thing Jyn thought she’d ever be able to do was sleep, but somehow, in that tiny, frozen shuttle, Jyn Erso fell asleep listening to the irregular, pained sound of Cassian’s breathing.

Jyn didn’t know how long it had been when she woke up. Her eyes felt sore. Her whole body ached. With tired eyes, she looked over to Cassian, slumped against the back of his chair, his eyes closed.  
“Cassian?” she whispered.  
He didn’t move. It hardly looked like he was breathing.  
“Cassian!” She said it more urgently this time, but he didn’t do much more than before.  
She crouched over and sat down beside Cassian. She grabbed his shoulder, but stopped short of shaking it, remembering the pain he’d been in before.  
“Cassian, wake up!” she hissed. “Cassian!”  
She could hear his breathing growing fainter and fainter.  
A loud rumbling shook the shuttle. Jyn scrambled to the window. A group of X-wing fighters zoomed past them. One fired a round of shots. The shuttle rumbled again.  
Jyn grabbed the subspace radio and seized the dash so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Stop firing! Stop firing! This…” Jyn swallowed. “This is Rogue One.”  
She glanced over at Cassian. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing anymore. She swallowed the lump in her throat. _He’s gone._  
The X-wing group stopped firing. A long hush fell over the pod, but it didn’t feel like a hush. Jyn heard her heart pounding as she waited for the lead X-wing to respond. Had they even heard Jyn? Or maybe she was dead somehow, and this is what death felt like.  
The subspace crackled. “Rogue One, this is Gold Leader. We have ceased firing. You can follow us back to Base One.”  
Jyn didn’t bother thanking him. Even if she’d been raised with enough manners to think about it, she had too much filling her mind to remember to express any sort of gratitude.  
It was beginning to wash over her now. They were dead. All of them. She and Cassian had been the only ones left. Now she didn’t even know if he was still there, but she kept talking to him.  
“Wake up, okay? We’re almost there. Come on, I’ll help you get out of here when we land. I promise. It’s just a little further from here, okay? Wake up, Cassian, come on!”  
Jyn’s voice broke. Her eyes filled up with water, but she didn’t have the tears left in her to actually cry.

  
Jyn docked the shuttle on her own in the main hangar. She breathed a heavy sigh and slumped back in her chair. _It’s over. It’s finally over._  
The shuttle door lowered. She could feel her legs prickle and fall asleep as she stood up. Her head ached a little. She looked over her shoulder at Cassian’s still, un-breathing body. _How could you leave me, Cassian? You and everyone else._  
Draven was waiting for her on the hangar floor.  
“Were there others?” he asked.  
Jyn stumbled out into the hangar bay. The great expanse of stone and converted ruins buzzed with voices and thundered with the sounds of footsteps. Jyn could hear ships taking off somewhere else in the hangar. “Aren’t you going to debrief me?”  
“I’m afraid there’s not much time to do that properly at the moment,” said Draven. “Not if we’re going to evacuate the base.”  
“Evacuate?”  
“Yes,” said Draven. “The Empire has determined our location. We’re breaking camp and moving somewhere else.”  
Over his shoulder, Jyn could see two men in orange carrying the limp body of a young man out of the shuttle on a stretcher. _Cassian._  
“No…” The word fell out of Jyn’s mouth like a thud.  
She tried to push past the rebel commander. He blocked her path. “Jyn, please—”  
But Jyn wouldn’t have it. She clawed at his arms and scowled. “No!”  
“Jyn, you need to calm down—”  
“No, please!” The words sounded more like they came from a wild animal than from a sentient, and Jyn felt like little more than an animal now. She cursed and screamed and kicked at Draven. She couldn’t see Cassian anymore. Where was he? Where were they taking him? “Cassian!”  
Draven grabbed her shoulders to keep her still. Maybe he meant it to be a fatherly action, but Jyn resisted it. That was all she was good for, right? Resisting? What was left to do now after she’d lost what little she’d found?  
“Jyn, calm—”  
“I need to know where you’re taking him,” she demanded.  
“They’re taking Captain Andor to the medical wing,” he said. “They’re going to see what they can do for him.”  
The frustration in his voice was not lost on Jyn. A hush fell over the two of them. Somewhere in the hangar bay, one of the rebels shouted something at his comrades that Jyn couldn’t quite discern, something like, _“Come on! Hurry up!”_  
She stammered. “Can they save him?”  
“I don’t know.” Draven pressed his lips together in a thin, firm line. He sighed. “You should probably get on another shuttle.”  
Jyn shot him a sour look and tried to push past him again.  
Draven tried to talk her down, “Jyn, we don’t know when they’re coming. It could be six days. It could be six months. For your own safety—”  
“I’m not leaving him behind!” she snarled.  
The same person shouted again. This time, Jyn heard them more clearly, but it was only a snatch of it—_“Come on, now! They could be here at any time!”_  
“Why don’t you just take him with us?” Jyn asked.  
Draven shook his head. “That’s for the medical team to decide.”  
Jyn studied Draven’s face. “Then why am I asking you?”  
Draven’s expression did not change.  
The same rebel shouted again. _“Come on, then! We haven’t got all day!”_  
She started walking backwards. She broke into a run.  
Draven didn’t stop her as she passed him, but he did call after her—“If you stay, there’s no guarantee that either of you will come back!”  
But that threat didn’t faze Jyn any. She wasn’t about to leave Cassian Andor. Not now. Not if she could help it.


	2. Adrift

Somewhere in the unforgiving expanse of space between Scarif and Yavin, Cassian Andor had drifted off. He had been looking at Jyn, her hair stiff with grit and her face streaked with blood—some of it his blood, he knew—and he argued with himself over whether or not to wake her up. But what would he say to her if he did? What could he say? What was left?  
“Your father would have been proud of you, Jyn.” It was an agony to get the words out, and Jyn was not awake to hear them.  
He could feel himself slipping away now. _I hope they find her. Please, let her live…_

  
Everything after that was a blur of sound. He heard the sound of ships firing, shuttles landing. He heard the sound of people shouting, but the words were incoherent at best. He remembered a bright light, a bluish-white one he could see through his eyelids. There were scattered words here and there—_puncture wound… broken ribs… bruising… internal bleeding…_  
At some point, he thought he opened his eyes enough to see Jyn’s dusty, bloodstained face, but he wasn’t sure if she saw him. She was alive, though, and that was all he asked for.

  
When he first woke up—if you could call it waking up—the air felt still. Not in the sense of sterile air. Actually, the air felt dusty, even stale. He opened his eyes a little and stared up at the carved stone-and-ferrocrete ceiling.  
He was back on Yavin 4. _I’m alive! How am I still alive?_  
“Cassian!” Jyn whispered.  
Cassian’s gaze shifted. Jyn sat beside him.  
She started to say his name again, but her voice trailed off. For a moment, Cassian thought he saw Jyn start to reach for him, as if she was going to take his hand in hers, or hold his wrist, or something, but she didn’t. Maybe she just paused for a second too long while moving her hands. Maybe he was just seeing things. He wasn’t sure.  
“Jyn?” he said. “How did we get here?”  
“They found us adrift near one of the outer moons,” Jyn explained. “I followed them back here.”  
Cassian listened for a moment. He’d been through the medical lab more than once. He had enough scars from all the sentients who tried to kill him to prove that. Every time, there had been other people. Not many, but enough to make noise.  
He couldn’t hear anyone now. All he could hear was his own breathing.  
“Where’s everyone else?” he asked.  
“They’ve evacuated,” said Jyn.  
Cassian’s eyes widened. “Evacuated?”  
Jyn nodded. “They told me we’ve destroyed the Death Star, but in the meantime it seems the Empire found out where we were. We’re not safe here anymore.”  
“Who told them?” asked Cassian.  
“I didn’t ask,” said Jyn.  
“Why not?”  
Jyn sighed and frowned. “You could say I had other things I was worried about.”  
_And you’re one of those things,_ the look on Jyn’s face seemed to say.  
Cassian wanted to apologize—for snapping at her, for being hurt, for putting her in danger like this—but he wasn’t sure how to say it.  
“Who else is still here?” he asked.  
“You and I… one or two med droids…” She shrugged. “That’s it. They couldn’t afford to spare anyone else at the time.”  
Cassian took a breath. It didn’t hurt so badly anymore. “We have to get going.”  
“I’d move carefully if I were you,” said Jyn.  
Cassian stood up and grabbed his jacket from where it hung at the edge of his cot. Pain shot through his side. He hissed.  
Jyn shot up and went to him.  
He held up a hand. “No, Jyn, you don’t have to—”  
She froze.  
They both froze.  
Jyn’s tired eyes were now wide. Tendrils of her brown hair stuck to her face with sweat and humidity. A small scab lined the edge of her face.  
Cassian took a deep breath. “I’m fine, Jyn.”  
Jyn nodded back. She seemed to relax a little bit more.  
He carefully pulled his jacket on. “We need to power down the med droids before we leave.” He looked back at Jyn. “Do you know where everyone else went?”  
“They were in the process of building a new base on Hoth. They left me the coordinates.”  
He nodded. “We’d better find K2 before we—”  
Cassian’s heart fell. _Oh. That’s right…_  
He and Jyn fell silent. She looked at him soberly and swallowed.  
Cassian looked at his feet for a moment. He took a deep breath. “Never mind. We… we should get going.”  
Jyn seemed to be studying Cassian’s face. She chewed on her bottom lip and nodded. “Okay.”  
He walked out the door. For the first time since before he fell, he didn’t feel like he was being stabbed or punched when he moved.  
They’d won, and he and Jyn had lived to tell about it. But it didn’t feel like a victory. If anything, he felt like he’d been left behind.


	3. Empty

Jyn never thought she’d miss Yavin 4. She’d hated it more than she cared to admit. She’d spent most of her life on cold, dry planets, like Lah’mu and Jedha, or at least cooler ones, like Coruscant.  
But being inside Base One made her feel like she was trapped inside a steamer. From the time she first got there, she felt like she and everything she touched was damp. She thought it was sweat at first, but in the handful of days it took to help everyone evacuate, Jyn noticed in passing that if someone spilled something—water, caf, any sort of liquid—it wouldn’t evaporate. It couldn’t. _There was too much water in the air!_ And all of the water made the heat feel like it was squeezing the life out of her.   
Echo Base, however, managed to make her miss it.  
For all the stuffiness, heat, and humidity, Base One was well established. Before fleeing Dantooine, the Rebels had the chance to properly move in. They were able to take their time to reinforce the older sections with ferrocrete, to wire the Massassi Temple in such a way that they did not have to worry about outages, to ensure that there was enough space for everyone to fit.  
Echo Base had no such advantages. The Rebel engineers and technicians had only started working a month before when they’d heard that the Empire had found Base One, that it was a just matter of time before they would have to move in. Instead of the year they were supposed to have, they had _days_.  
So there was barely enough room. And the passages were too narrow. And there were too few passages. And the generators and power converters were installed in such a way that every so often the power would cut out in one wing or passage or another. And the equipment was too old or too new and short-circuited from time to time. And it was the only real place the Rebels had to go for the time being.

  
Jyn didn’t have quarters, either of her own or shared with someone. Leia, the Princess of Alderaan, had offered to share her quarters with her, but Jyn didn’t think that would have been right; The princess of a dead planet living with the daughter of the man who made killing said planet possible felt wrong. Jyn didn’t know Leia well, and what manners Jyn had were few and far between, but she had sense enough to know what it might feel like to stare at the only child of the one who destroyed your everything. She couldn’t do that to her.  
It wasn’t as if Jyn felt she needed quarters anyway. Her sleep cycle had been off since she was a kid. Who cared where she slept? Or when? No one had cared before. Besides, Jyn could sleep anywhere.  
Well, she had been able to sleep anywhere, once. Now, it was all she could do to shut her eyes, maybe float within the thinnest stages of sleep where one might as well be awake. Cassian found her in the mess like that once, arms crossed in front of her, slumped over a table.  
“That doesn’t look very comfortable,” he said.  
“It’s more comfortable than it looks,” she said, her voice muffled by the sleeves of the coat she was wearing.  
He sat down next to her. “Is this where you’ve been sleeping all this time?”  
Jyn didn’t want to tell him it was. “Here and there. What’re you doing up?”  
Cassian glanced around the empty mess hall, then back at Jyn. “I traded some ration packs around with some of the other troops.”  
“Traded rations?” The idea seemed foreign to Jyn.  
Cassian nodded. “Rations are currency on Rebel bases. People will trade for anything sometimes.”  
“What did they give you?” Jyn asked.  
Cassian listed off his bounty like it was a mission report. “Dehydrated eggs, a small package of polystarch flour, dried pop peppers—”  
Jyn’s eyes widened. “Pop peppers? Out here?”  
“I was surprised too. It cost me quite a few packs to get them,” he said.  
“Do you think they were worth it?” she asked.  
“I was actually going to sneak into the kitchen and find out.” He tilted his head a little. “Do you… do you care to join me?”

It didn’t occur to Jyn that Cassian could cook. She didn’t expect him to be as good at cooking as he was either. Not that she was about to complain. She welcomed a distraction. There was something nice about watching him. Seeing his hands around the handle of a spoon was a welcome change from a blaster.  
He looked up from the sauce he was making with the pop peppers. “Jyn? Would you mind working on the polystarch bread?”  
Jyn shook her head. “I—I can’t cook.”  
Cassian smiled gently. “You don’t have to know how to cook. Just put a little of the package in a bowl of water and stir it around with your finger.”  
Jyn nodded and set to work. “Who taught you to cook?”  
Cassian was so silent that for a while, Jyn wondered if he was going to answer, or if he’d even heard her.  
At last he answered. “My mother.” He dragged the spoon along the bottom of the small metal cup he was using as a pot. “She taught me to snap beans, mix batter, kept me out of trouble.” He pressed his mouth together into a firm line. “After she… well, after I was about eleven, I taught myself everything else. Necessity.”  
Jyn eyed the metal cup of sauce. “Necessity doesn’t teach you to cook like this.”  
He smiled again. “Well, I never knew…” Cassian’s voice trailed off. He spoke again, but softer. “I never knew which meal would be my last.”  
Jyn looked over at him. He seemed to be staring at nothing. She wondered what it was he was thinking about. At the same time, she could guess.  
“Right before Scariff..." Jyn asked. "Did you think you'd ever cook like this again?"  
Cassian didn’t answer.  
Jyn’s gut twisted. She was an idiot for asking. She hated thinking about Scariff. She hadn’t slept since her first night at Base One, keeping a vigil over Cassian alone, because she’d bolted awake from a dream where she was annihilated by a wave of sand and golden-white light. Every time she closed her eyes after, she’d wondered what happened to the others—where they died, how they died. She wondered if one or two of them might have still been out there somewhere when she half-carried, half-dragged Cassian to the shuttle. Maybe, if she’d thought about it, she could have saved them. Maybe Bodhi or Chirrut or Baze might have been alive if she’d thought to look for them. She’d never know now, though. They were dead, but Jyn couldn’t help but wonder.  
What made her think Cassian would want to talk about Scariff if she didn’t even like to _think_ about it?  
“Never mind,” said Jyn quietly. “Don't answer that.”  
She wasn’t sure if he had heard her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long to update. I've been working on other projects and college has taken a lot of my time.


	4. Useless

Cassian wasn’t used to sitting around like this. Most of the time, his time in the Rebellion was filled with constant activity. Even when he was having to wait, there was a tension just beneath the waiting. Action could happen at any moment.  
That wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. It had been almost two weeks since Scariff. He was still limping. Now and then, his sides still ached from the places where his broken ribs were still fragile. He felt like he was eighty, not twenty-six.  
Princess Leia Organa—who was suddenly a princess of nowhere, the ruler and heir to a collection of asteroids flying this way and that—had insisted on meeting him when all was said and done. She must have noticed his painful frustration every time he adjusted himself in his seat during his debriefing.   
She tried to comfort him. “You’ll mend. Just be patient.”  
He’d nodded uneasily—Cassian wasn’t used to getting much attention, let alone from someone like Leia—and said, “I’ll try.”  
After a while, though, the healing process began to feel agonizingly slow. There was only so much for Cassian to do. His friends had died fighting for this Rebellion. Force, Cassian and Jyn had almost died themselves. For Cassian, this hadn’t been the first time either. He couldn’t sit back and do nothing to help it, not now.  
But Hoth was a harsh world, and given that Cassian’s body still hadn’t healed from Scariff, sitting back was most of what he was good for.

  
Two weeks ago he’d been on the run from the Imperials. Now it felt like he was just sitting in the briefing room, waiting for the Imperials to find him.  
Leia had asked to speak with him. They met in a back room off the South Passage, along with Jyn and two men Cassian recognized as Captain Solo and Luke Skywalker.  
“I have news,” said Leia.  
“Oh, yeah? Good news?” asked Solo.  
“Not quite. The heating unit in the East Passage keeps shorting out, you’ll remember.” said Leia.  
All of them nodded. The coils had been an ongoing problem since the Rebels moved into the base.  
“It’s gotten worse. Some of us are getting kind of worried.” Leia looked at the four of them. “Have any of you seen anything while on reconnaissance? Or heard of anything at all?”  
Skywalker and Solo shook their heads.  
Cassian paused. “I have.”  
All of them turned to him.  
“Captain, I wasn’t aware you had left the base,” said Leia.  
Cassian shook his head. “No. But I was sent to this planet some time ago.”  
The episode was still fresh in Cassian’s memory. It was a secret mission. He’d been tracking down a rebel ship that went down somewhere in the Clabburn Range, albeit much further north from here. There had been experimental tech on the ship—tech they couldn’t risk the Empire knowing about. He spent weeks looking for the ship, a lot longer than either he or Draven had expected. He’d been alone the whole time. He wouldn’t have found K2 for another… Never mind.  
“There’s a pirate base somewhere else in the range,” he said. “Abandoned—most of it’s falling apart—but some of it is still functional. Or at least it was six years ago.”  
“Do you remember how far away it was?” Leia asked.  
“Due north,” said Cassian. “Three or four days from here on foot.”  
Leia looked at Solo and Skywalker. “Do you think that’s close enough?”  
Cassian frowned and furrowed his brow. “You aren’t thinking of going there?”  
“The East Passage houses some pretty necessary equipment,” said Solo. “If we could get parts any other way, we could, but we have to cannibalize. It’s this or we tear apart our ships.”  
“The base is derelict,” said Cassian. “You’re better off tearing your ships to bits.”  
“Nobody touches my ship!” Solo snapped.  
Leia groaned and rolled her eyes. “Here we go…”  
Solo whipped his head in Leia’s direction. “What do you mean, ‘Here we go’?”  
Luke sighed. “Han, Leia, we don’t have time to argue over this. If we can’t cannibalize the base or the _Falcon_, we’ll just move the equipment.”  
“There’s not anywhere we can move it,” said Solo. “A lot of the barracks are storage compartments as it is.”  
“It doesn’t have to be forever,” said Luke. “Just until we get the heating unit fixed.”  
“I like your optimism, kid, but we’ve been working on that thing for months now,” said Solo. “Either we replace the coils or everything off the east corridor is good as useless.”  
The five of them fell silent.  
“Well,” said Luke, “I’m sure we’ll figure out something.”  
And they dispersed, off to their duties.  
But Cassian, with not much to do and nowhere else to be, lingered. For a second, it looked like Jyn was going to linger too. But the most she did was look at him for a few moments too long. Then she walked away and left him.  
So he left and went back to his quarters to rest.

  
Wincing, Cassian laid himself down on his cot in his quarters—more of a broom closet, really, and the door was broken but he wasn’t going to complain. It was better than what many of the other Rebels had. He’d given Jyn a hard time when he found her sleeping in the mess the day before, but it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He hadn’t slept much either. He couldn’t sleep most nights. He kept waking up.  
Now and then, when he was about to drift off, he’d hear K2’s footsteps—or think he heard them—somewhere down the hall. Cassian didn’t believe in ghosts, although he’d heard stories of Jedi coming back from beyond. But if any of it was true, he wouldn’t have minded it if one of the others came back for a moment to tell him what had happened to them. He knew they were dead, but he would have liked to thank them, if only once, to tell them they hadn’t died for nothing.  
Even then, though, he wasn’t sure a ghost could come from a being without a soul. wasn’t quite sure if droids had souls, but if any droid could have fooled him into thinking they did, then K2 could have fooled the whole galaxy.  
As if conjured in by Cassian’s thoughts, he heard a creaking, metallic sound. He bolted up and his gaze darted to the doorway.  
Nothing.  
It was always nothing.  
Even if ghosts were real, K2 wouldn’t be the one to come back.  
Chirrut had been right about Cassian carrying his prison with him. Maybe K2’s ghost had become part of that prison he carried with him.  
Maybe some wounds would never heal right.

  
The sound of a woman breathing woke Cassian up in the middle of that night. It was Jyn, curled on the ground by his bed, sleeping. She must have gotten in through the broken door.   
He wanted to pick her up, to lay her in his bed. He could sleep somewhere else. He could sleep anywhere else. It was better if she slept here than the mess hall. But when he reached for her… It seemed childish, but he felt afraid to touch her. Like he _shouldn’t_. He wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t want to wake her, or out of respect or…  
Or…  
Cassian took the scratchy blanket off his cot and laid it over Jyn. She barely stirred. He left to find somewhere else to sleep.   
He took one last look at her before leaving.  
_ Sleep well, Jyn_.


	5. Underground

The four disbanded. Something nagged at Jyn. _Speak up. Say something. Say it._  
Jyn ran down the hallway after the princess and the other two. “Princess! Princess Organa!”  
Leia said something to Han and Luke, who went on ahead of her, before she turned around. “Yes, Jyn?”  
Jyn stopped just in front of her and cleared her dry throat. “I’d like to volunteer.”  
Leia raised an eyebrow. “Volunteer for what?”  
“Captain Andor isn’t able to make it to the base in the upper Clabburn Range. I can.”  
Leia furrowed her brows and folded her arms. “Go on.”  
Jyn nodded. “He said it was three or four days on foot. A snowspeeder or a tauntaun or something should be able to cut that time down.”  
“I can’t have you go alone,” said Leia. “I’d have to send you with someone else.” She nodded. “I’ll talk to Luke.”  
Jyn nodded.  
“I’ll talk to him,” Leia repeated. Leia pressed her mouth into a thin line. She looked up at Jyn. “Expect to be leaving tomorrow morning.”  
Jyn nodded again. “Yes, Princess.” She started to walk away.  
“And Jyn?”  
Jyn looked back.  
Leia nodded. “Thank you for volunteering.”  
Jyn felt the color going out of her face. She couldn’t quite look at Leia in the eyes. She moved her hands behind her back.  
“…Thank you,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  
Jyn knew better than to tell Cassian where she was going. It’d only make him angry with her, and he had enough on his mind. She didn’t see the point in telling him anyway. What was he going to do about it? Sure, he was technically of higher rank, but he knew better than to think Jyn would listen to him. She could just run off, like she did when she was a kid.  
_Except there’s nowhere else for me to run to now._  
Even then, it didn’t seem right for her to leave without saying goodbye in some way. She found him in a small nook off of the West Passage with two cots and not much else. She didn’t like the idea of waking him up. For once, when she looked at his face he didn’t look like he fighting any pain. He needed some sort of break from that. He wouldn’t have thought so, but she did.  
She sat down on the ground next to him, waiting for him to wake up. Tired as she was, as near-sleepless as the last weeks had been, Jyn fell asleep there.   
When she woke up, he’d gone. Maybe it was just as well.

  
She and Luke left by the South entrance by tauntaun. Leia figured leaving from the hangar by snowspeeder would attract too much attention.

  
The base was nestled between two mountains. The heavy metal door, scarred with blaster fire and claw marks, was cracked slightly.  
“Looks like something’s forced an entry,” said Luke. “The coils might be gone already.”  
“Doesn’t hurt to look.” Jyn climbed off her tauntaun and beckoned Luke to follow her. She pried at the metal door.  
“Jyn—”  
A loud, high-pitched scraping screamed through the cold air as Jyn pulled on the door. Luke winced at the sound.   
Jyn straightened up. The door budged a little, but not enough to let Jyn through.  
“I could help you with that,” said Luke.  
Jyn shook her head. “Tie the tauntauns’ reins to that post over there, then get your blaster ready.”  
“Why?”  
“Because if there’s someone in here we might have to fight our way in or out,” said Jyn.  
Luke exhaled through his nose. Jyn could see his breath clouding in the air. He nodded.  
With another final creak, Jyn tore the rusted, weakened door away. She took out her blaster and glowrod.   
Luke nodded. “Lead the way.”

  
It smelled like death inside. Every hallway stank with it—rotting, filthy. Strange, since there weren’t any signs of corpses, not even bones. Wires with yellow and black coatings dangled from the ceiling, haphazardly strung down each hall. Yellow lights flashed beside several doors.  
The cave rumbled.  
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Luke.  
Jyn nodded to the blinking lights. “The wiring still works, though. Maybe the heating coils do too.”  
“Sure hope so.” Luke swung his glowrod forward. His eyes squinted. “Hold on.”  
He walked past Jyn to a marking on the far wall—a huge circle with what looked like almost like a jenth across the center.  
“That’s a Hound Syndicate symbol,” said Luke.  
Jyn stepped back a little from Luke. “You’re familiar with the Hound Syndicate?”  
Luke frowned. “Not very. They’re involved in the spice trade back home. What’re they doing all the way out here?”  
“I’m not sure we’ll find that out.”  
Jyn chewed on her bottom lip. It had been years since she’d been inside a Hound Syndicate base on Jedha. She was younger then, maybe nine or ten, small enough that she wouldn’t be noticed. She wondered if the base had a similar layout. If so, the heating coils should be…  
“Follow me.”

  
Their boots crunched against the icy ground. Jyn walked ahead of Luke. She tried to remember the directions Saw had given her—_Left, left again, then make a right. From there just keep going straight_. She could still hear it in his voice when she tried to remember. She hoped she’d still hear his voice when she thought of him for as long as she stayed alive. He hadn’t always been the best of guardians—she was still trying to forgive him for leaving her—but he’d left her with his voice and enough skills to keep herself alive. For that much she was grateful.  
They stopped in front of a large metal door with a red blinking light.   
“This is it,” said Jyn.  
Luke pried open a panel and rewired the door lock. The door opened with a puff of air and a loud metallic scream that made Jyn wince.   
The room made Jyn think of the inside of a drum or a barrel. The walls of the room were made of ice and compressed snow, like everything else in the base, but there seemed to be some metal crossbeams supporting parts of the room. In the center, a red cylinder, glowing through its cracks with heat, stood on a stand in the center of the room.   
“That thing doesn’t look very stable. I don’t know how long we have until the ceiling gives way,” said Luke.   
Jyn studied the cracks in the icy ceiling. She noticed stalactites of ice where the heating coils had thawed and frozen and thawed and refrozen over the past several years. “Maybe a few hours.”  
She and Luke looked at each other. Jyn thought about asking him if they should go after it. The coils looked to be broken. They’d need to fix them after they got back to Echo Base. Was the risk worth it? Maybe they should just make do.  
“We have to bring this back,” she said.  
Luke nodded. “We need to be quick about this. Did you bring the tools?”  
Jyn nodded. She didn’t say another word as she stepped through the doorway. The air was still except for the soft dripping of water from the ceiling.  
A siren hollered in the distance. Each howl grew louder and closer. Jyn whirled around to Luke.  
But before either of them could say a word, the doors screamed shut.


End file.
